


Both Feet on the Ground

by Laylah



Series: Creature Comforts [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Backstory, M/M, POV First Person, Polyamory, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-14
Updated: 2006-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 09:35:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You and me both.” He pours whiskey into both glasses. “Here’s to getting out of the cage.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Both Feet on the Ground

The first night we’re free he comes to my room. The walls in the old hotel are thin, and I’m not the first of us that he’s visited.

“Get out,” I tell him.

“I only wanted to —” he starts.

“Yeah,” I say, “I’ve been hearing you. Not interested in getting fucked. Leave.”

He shrugs, with this little grin that says, ‘can’t blame a guy for trying,’ and reaches for the doorknob. “Good night, Law,” he says.

* * *

The second night he finds me right after dinner, cornering me in the hall as soon as he can catch me alone. “You all right?” he says.

“Fine,” I say, not quite sure why he’s asking.

“I didn’t freak you out, then, with the hammer thing.” He cocks one eyebrow, slitted eyes looking at me over the rims of his sunglasses.

What he did this afternoon would freak anybody out. But I’m a soldier. “I’ve seen worse.”

He nods. “So if I need you to do that again, to make a point to somebody, you can take a cue?”

I snort. “You want to know if you can trust me to knock your arrogant head off? That’s not even work.”

“I want to know if I can trust you to knock my arrogant head off when it’s called for,” he corrects, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Kimberly would do it any old time.”

“Except when you need him to,” I add.

He grins, sharp teeth and sharp angles. “All too true. I like you, Law. I think we’re going to get along fine. Have a good night.”

* * *

The third night we’re on a train, leaving Central, after he charmed the station personnel into letting us on the southbound local even with no proof of identification and a few awfully strange characters — Tucker, Gecko — traveling with us. He finds me in the dining car, late, watching the scenery go by.

“Nice, isn’t it?” he asks, sitting down across the booth, setting down a bottle of whiskey and two glasses between us.

“I was starting to forget what trees looked like,” I say, without really meaning to.

“You and me both.” He pours whiskey into both glasses. “Here’s to getting out of the cage.”

“I’ll drink to that.” It’s good whiskey, something else I had almost forgotten. Between the laboratory and the missions in Ishvar, it’s been years since the last time I had a drink.

We finish the first round and he pours a second before he says, “So. You were soldiers.” I nod. “Looks like you saw a lot of active duty.”

It’s not technically a question. But he’s trying to be friendly, and his whiskey’s good. “There was a war. Six, seven years ago. In Ishvar.”

“You were in it?”

“We _started_ it.” The details are fuzzy in my head by now — the laboratory erased a lot of what came before it. But I remember enough. “Covert ops. They sent us in to disrupt things, to goad the Ishvarite resistance faction into open rebellion so the regulars could go in and wipe them out.” I push my glass toward him, and he fills it again. “Five out of the six of us made it back.

“After that...they started sending us on all the dangerous missions. We figured out after a while that we weren’t supposed to come back. That we were supposed to be dead war heroes.” My glass is empty again. It’s the first time I’ve talked about this to anyone who wasn’t there.

“But you survived anyway,” he says, and the admiration in his tone shouldn’t make me proud, but it does.

“Once we figured it out we got a lot more paranoid. We looked out for each other. A dozen more of the nastiest missions the brass could come up with, and we didn’t lose a man — even if it was close, that last time. But we got everyone back to base — and then they shipped us to the lab, instead of the hospital.” I look out the window. If he offers me sympathy I’ll take his head off right now.

“How did the war go?” he asks, and I hear a clink as he sets his own glass down on the table.

“I don’t know. We spent the rest of it in cages. Ask Tucker — he was free. Hell, ask Kimberly — the bastard was there.”

He slides out of the booth and stands up with a smile. “I think I’ll do that. Keep the rest of the whiskey.”

I stare at the bottle, after he leaves. It’s more than half full. I can’t help thinking that maybe his name doesn’t fit him quite so well after all.

* * *

The fourth night it’s another cheap hotel in some little shit town while we wait for the southbound train in the morning. Dorochet’s from South City, and he says we can find someplace to stay down there while Tucker tries to figure out how to fix the guys who want to be human again.

Greed actually shows up to my room this time, for the first time since I told him to get out. He smells like sex, but he says, “I just want to talk,” so I wait.

He sits down on the end of the bed. “Tell me about the laboratory,” he says.

I get up, cross the room, dig the whiskey bottle out of my bag, sit down in the chair across from him. “That’s not something I want to talk about sober.” I take a pull from the bottle, and it burns straight down to my stomach. Which is nice, because it’s chilly in here, but I’m damned if I’m going to put a shirt on and have him think I’m uncomfortable with him seeing me.

“That bad, hmm?” he asks.

I take another drink. “You saw it,” I say. “So I don’t have to tell you what the conditions were like.” I could easily down the rest of the bottle trying to do this, but I don’t want to, so I pass it to him.

“Thanks,” he says, looking surprised. He’s not so bad, really.

“The guys who came in late tend to not like Tucker — because they don’t remember what it was like before he got recruited. The first researchers had a much higher failure rate. I think Gecko’s the only one from that batch who survived, and even he doesn’t really remember who he was before.

“We lost two guys from our squad before Tucker got there. Nagi was the first one they tried to cross with a snake. He never made it out of the transmutation circle. And Eli.... Give me that fucking bottle.”

He passes it over without a word, and I take a long drink. “You would have liked Eli. Everybody liked Eli. He was a good kid.

“They thought he was going to make it. They got him out of the circle, and he was shaky and breathing hard, but he was alive. So they put him back in the holding cell.” There isn’t enough whiskey in the world, but I’m trying. “In the middle of the night he went into convulsions. Started thrashing and howling. I tried to help, but...he died in my arms.”

I take another drink, and he makes an angry little hissing noise that somehow manages to be sympathetic but not pitying. “How did the rest of you get through?”

“They only took people for the experiments who were in good condition to start with. So it was kind of the last favor Eli did for me.” I turn, so Greed can see the long ridges of scar tissue down my back. “He clawed me up pretty bad. Dorochet was already injured from the last mission — he was touch-and-go for a while, and it took him a long time to really heal.”

“That’s those marks on his side?” Greed asks, tracing the line of them on his own body, ribcage down to hip.

“Yeah. Grenade.” I can still remember the wet red of exposed muscle, the little agonized sounds that escaped his clenched teeth as Martel and Eli tried to bandage him up tight enough that he wouldn’t bleed to death before we could get him out of there.

Then Greed asks the question I don’t want to answer. “What about Martel?”

I take a deep breath. “I broke her arm.”

“Good man,” he says quietly. I look up, but there’s no mockery in his face, just age and hurt. “Saved her life, didn’t it?”

“Got us all locked down in solitary,” I shrug. “But yeah, I guess it did. By the time we got out of the pits, Tucker was there. His system still wasn’t perfect, but getting volunteered for him wasn’t an automatic death sentence.”

I hand him the bottle. “If you hurt them....” Except I have no threats. I’ve killed him twice, and he’s thanked me both times.

He doesn’t drink, just meets my eyes steadily. “I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to hurt any of you.”

I nod. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“Good.” He smiles as he stands, and rests a hand on my shoulder. “Get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.”

“Good night, then.”

His hand squeezes for a second before he steps away. “Good night, Law.”

* * *

The fifth night we’re at the edge of South City, in a boarding house so shady that the owner told Greed he couldn’t guarantee Martel’s safety. The rest of us got out of the way, and she blacked both the asshole’s eyes and broke his nose before Greed got around to asking her to stop.

I lie awake, listening to the sounds from the other rooms — fights from downstairs, the creak of bedsprings, moans, and once a sharp bang followed by an ugly wet splatter. He never shows, and even when it gets late and everything goes quiet, I have a hard time falling asleep.

* * *

The sixth night I don’t wait. We’ve moved again, getting rooms upstairs from a bar closer to the middle of town. He likes the bar, and that’s where I find him, sprawled on one of the couches with a pretty little whore in his lap. She looks about fifteen, and he looks like he’s having fun but not about to pay for it, so I grab a couple of whiskies and sit down across from him.

“You never showed up last night,” I say, holding one glass out toward him.

He grins, and reaches for it. “Shoo,” he says to the girl, and she makes a little irritated noise but slides off his lap anyway. “Come back later,” he purrs, smiling at her over the rim of his glass, and she actually blushes.

“She’s going to end up giving it away,” I say as she walks off.

“Yeah,” he says, sipping his drink. “It’s a point of pride, really. I never pay for it. Pay _with_ it, every once in a while, but never for it.”

I have trouble picturing him giving it up for anyone, and it must show in my face, because he laughs. “You don’t think I’d look good on my knees?”

“I just can’t see you there.”

His smile turns predatory, inviting. “I could show you.”

That’s another thing I haven’t had in years. I will _not_ give him a straight answer. “Are you trying to tell me that you would blow me when you could be fucking her?”

He shrugs. “I can always find another whore. You’re one of my people, and that means taking care of you comes first.”

I’m not up for this conversation, I realize abruptly. Definitely not when there’s alcohol involved. “I can take care of myself,” I say, getting up to leave. He looks hurt, which shouldn’t bother me, but I find myself saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Greed.”

The smile flickers across his face again — relieved? — and he nods. “Have a good night, Law.”

* * *

The seventh night I don’t know what to expect. I haven’t seen him all day — the first day that we’re finally not moving, the first day that we have the time to just fuck around and not worry about catching trains or finding a place to stay. I shoot some pool with Dorochet in the afternoon — he plays a lousy game of pool, but he’s a good sport about buying the beers when he loses — and Martel brings back dinner for all of us from a restaurant down the block.

But he does show up that night, standing in the doorway to my room when I’m stripping out of my coat and boots, getting ready for bed. “Can I come in?” he asks.

He’s never asked before. “Sure,” I say. “Make yourself at home.” I have a feeling I know where this is going, and…I don’t really mind anymore. Hell, Martel and Dorochet almost act like they’re comfortable in their skins lately.

“Thanks,” he says, closing the door behind him with a click. He takes a seat and just watches me, quiet, while I unbutton my shirt.

“Nothing to say tonight?” I ask.

“I’ve said my piece,” he shrugs, taking off his sunglasses and slipping them into a pocket in his vest. He looks at me steadily with those weird eyes of his, waiting. “All that’s left is for you to say whether you’re interested.”

What the hell, I figure. “I didn’t tell you to get out, did I?”

“No,” he says quietly. “You didn’t.” And he gets up, coming closer slowly, and hooks his fingers in the waistband of my pants. He’s very careful, reserved, like he’s trying not to make this personal enough that I might panic.

But that’s not quite right. That’s not what has Dorochet sleeping through the nights, not what stops Martel from tensing and hissing anytime anyone gets within arm’s reach of her these days. I tilt his chin up with one hand, and lean down to kiss him. He might whore when he has to, but I don’t think I want something that cold.

He makes a noise like he’s surprised, at first, and then he pushes up against me and his tongue’s in my mouth and I didn’t expect that to feel as good as it does. I pull him closer, and I can feel his skin changing against mine, turning warm and soft along his chest and stomach. He’s taking his shield down for me.

I know it doesn’t really make him vulnerable. I know he could still recover, even if he let himself be gutted. But it still means a lot.

His hands haven’t moved, still right there at my waist, and after a minute I feel him starting to unbutton my pants. I kiss him harder, and he slides a hand in, wraps his fingers around my cock. It doesn’t seem to bother him that I’m not really hard yet — he just strokes, slow and hard and sure, and fuck, I’m getting there.

He pulls out of the kiss and licks at my throat instead, his mouth hot and wet and trailing slowly down my chest as I hold onto him and push into his hand, and try not to think about how much power it gives him if I _need_ this. My breathing sounds loud in my ears, and I don’t remember how long it’s been anymore since anyone touched me, wanted to touch me, just that it’s been way too long.

“Would you be more comfortable lying down?” he asks, lips moving against my skin.

Once he says it, it does sound like a good idea. I nod, letting go of him and slipping my shirt off.

He doesn’t even take his hand out of my pants, still stroking my cock while he plants his other hand in the center of my chest and pushes, and I let him guide me backward to the bed. “Good,” he says, following me down onto it. “That makes it so much easier to taste you.”

I shiver. He sounds so hungry, so pleased — like I’m doing _him_ the fucking favor. He lowers his head to my chest again, licking and biting with teeth that are almost too sharp, leaving marks, and I push into his hand. If he told me now that he’d rather be doing this than fucking a whore — well, I’d still be surprised, but I might almost believe it.

He’s _purring_ as he licks his way down my stomach, and I grit my teeth, because somehow this has gotten really good, better than I expected, and I don’t want to go off in his hand. Not when I can see where this is going. Not when he’s tugging my pants down further, out of the way, and his mouth keeps moving down, hot and wet.

Fuck how long it’s been, even. I’ve never been with somebody who wanted it like this, the way he moans as he buries his face in my crotch, the way he licks his way up the shaft of my cock like he’s savoring the taste. When he opens his mouth and slides down on it, all the way, like he has no gag reflex at all, I can’t help a groan.

He purrs again, looking up at me, mouth stretched open around my cock, and his eyes are hungry. And then he slides back down, taking my cock deep into his throat, and one of his hands slides down between his own legs. I watch the flex of his shoulder, in time with the smooth glide of his mouth.

Sucking my cock gets him hot enough that he’s jerking off over it.

More, God, I want more. “Faster,” I manage, through clenched teeth.

He pulls up with a grin. “Show me,” he says, his tone challenging, and wraps his lips around just the head of it, and stops.

I thrust up into his mouth, and he takes it, making another one of those obscene fucking noises. So I do it again, harder, holding him by the hair to keep him still. He goes limp and boneless and moans like he wants it.

He’s strong enough to stop me if I go too far, I realize. I don’t have to be careful with him. I don’t have to hold back. I can do this just how I want, holding him tight and thrusting into his mouth, hard and fast, _fucking_ him — he doesn’t stop me, he moans and whimpers and moves his hand faster, and lets me use his mouth as hard as I want.

Then he’s making more noise, faster and more desperate, and he shudders, his whole body taut, and I realize _Greed just came with my cock in his mouth_ , and I can’t hold back — and I don’t want to — and I stop trying to wait for it, letting it tear me apart, and I’m making noises like bull in rut, but I can’t help it — and I can feel his throat working as I come, sucking and swallowing, living up to his name at last.

“Damn.” I collapse against the bed, trying to catch my breath. He sits up, wiping his mouth on the back of one hand.

“Get what you needed?” he asks as he reaches down to button up his trousers. He’s grinning, like he’s awfully proud of himself.

My shoulders are less tense, my head clearer, and — I just feel better about life in general. More like there’s hope for me, for all of us. Which is ridiculous. Nothing has really changed. But life does seem easier to take after a good come.

“Yeah,” I say, “most of it.”

He pauses, head cocked to one side. “Anything else I can do?”

I almost don’t want to say it. But I’m far enough in his debt already that it probably won’t matter. I shrug, try to make it sound casual. “You could come here.”

The grin softens into something more — I don’t know, more human. “I could do that,” he says. He crawls up the bed, shrugs out of his vest and tosses it over the side before he lies down beside me.

There’s not much room — I’m a big guy, and the bed’s not really designed for two. But he doesn’t complain, just curls in against me, his head on my shoulder. “Like this?”

I rest a hand on the small of his back. “Yeah. This is good.”

He presses his lips to my throat, relaxes into my arms. “Good night, Law.”


End file.
